1. Gravity Forms is easy. You simply name the form and start dragging fields into it. You edit the title of the filed and add directions to filling out the filed if needed and you are good to go. Really, a cave man could do it.
2. You can create simple contact forms with almost any form maker. The real beauty of Gravity Forms is the ability to make most any kind of form, such as a lead generation form or a product or service purchase form, which sends you the completed form responses in an e-mail and keeps it in the database. You can then export the form data into a csv file.
3. Gravity Forms works with PayPal Pro or Standard and Authorize.net for billing and it also integrates with Freshbooks. I use it for people to sign up for a Talk It Out Session with me. When someone fills out this form they are automatically added as a new client in my Freshbooks application and also in my Mail Chimp list and it automatically creates an invoice in Freshbooks for a Talk It Out Session. At that point, I receive an e-mail that contains all of the form information, prompting me to login to Freshbooks to look over the invoice and if correct, I just press the send button to have an e-mail sent to the client with a link to the Freshbooks invoice which they can pay right then using Paypal. How easy is that?
4. You can create forms with conditional logic. This sounds scary but it isn’t. This gives you the ability to present certain fields when a client answers an item in a certain manner. Otherwise those fields do not appear. I was surprised at how easy and intuitive this process was when I did my first form using conditional items. Check out the sponsorship form I created for Inman Park Theatre Night.
5. The ability to route forms to different people depending on the selection of a particular item is a necessity for a larger organizations. For example, if the person indicates they are interested in a particular product line, an e-mail notification can be automatically routed to the product manager for that specific product.
6. There are use cases that require information from an end user that will become a post. Gravity forms lets them add information to the form, such as an item for sale or a job listing. The user fills out the form adding content to the fields: title, body, excerpt, category, tags, image and even custom field. Gravity Forms then automatically creates a post, in draft form, ready to be edited, if needed, and published.
7. You can use Gravity Forms to create multi-page forms with a title for each section. Your client will see a status bar at the top of the form showing them the percentage of completion.
8. With Gravity Forms you can allow a user to upload files. If for example, you are asking job candidates to send information about themselves, you can also have them upload their resumes.
9. You can use Gravity Forms as a simple e-commerce solution and accept payments for items or services.
10. The business and pro level versions of Gravity Forms, integrates with A-Weber and MailChimp e-mail services so that the user can be automatically be added to your mailing list.

Can you see why I say that Gravity forms is a must have plugin?

The trick is to have people share your posts you have to make it easy for them and now Click to Tweet has made it so easy for us. Go to Click to Tweet, and create a message that you want to share when someone clicks the link on your website or newsletter,  click the “generate” button to and you custom link will be created. You copy it and add your custom link to your content!

When someone clicks the link, your message will automatically be added to their update status box on Twitter – all ready to go out or for them to add to it when they click the tweet!

Want to see this in action? Tweet about this post!

I met Chris Guillebeau on Twitter. Last year, Chris Guillebeau had himself an unconventional book tour for his first book, The Art of Non-Conformity. I reached out to him and told him that the Urban Oasis would be a great location for his Atlanta stop. Chris took me up on the offer and we hosted the event. It was quite an evening with 125 people, a band and lots of fun. Chris sold out of books and a good time was had by all.

Last summer, Chris returned the favor by hosting an amazing conference in his home town of Portland Oregon called the World Domination Summit. There were five hundred of the most fascinating people. There were travelers, people running small businesses of their dreams and everyone was blogging about all of it. My husband, Duane and I went and had a terrific time. I got to meet people in real life that I had only known online, which is always fun. He is hosting another World Domination Summit this July for eight hundred people that sold out in 13 minutes! You can bet on it. Duane and I will be there.

Chris has been busy this year and just published his new book, The $100 Start Up. It will be available May 8th. I got an advanced copy and have thoroughly enjoyed it. This book is a great read and has good ideas for people starting their dream businesses or who are building them. I loved his description of how he chooses the projects that he is going to undertake. As a small business person myself, actually running two businesses, the bed and breakfast and my web design company, I know there is only so much time and I can’t do everything. Chris shows us how to rate our ideas on several factors and choose the one that is the best fit for meeting our goals.

We are hoping for a big crowd. If we are lucky, there will be a food truck and a brass band.

If you are in Atlanta come on by. If not be sure to check out The other stops on Chris’s twenty-two city tour.

I suggest that you try engaging with others you find interesting and see who responds. You might also want to actually form a group of real life people who will commit to supporting each other online.

As you get more and more people people  you are following,  it is hard to track your special peeps. This is where a Twitter list can come in handy. Building a Twitter list of those people makes it easier to keep track of their tweets so you can focus more of your attention on them. Twitter lists are great, but are still time-consuming to create and manage. They tend to get out of date and I forget to add new people to my lists who should be on the list and then I don’t even realize that they aren’t on my list.

What’s a person to do?

I am going to share with you this new trick I learned that will help you create a list of the people that engage with you and even better, the list will continue to expand to include people who mention or retweet your tweets in the future – on the fly!  If you build this little system, your “engagers” won’t get lost and you can be sure to respond or retweet their posts and hopefully they will give you some Twitter Love in return.

This very cool tool is called, iftt, ”If Then Then That”. This app lets you create and automate tasks across social media apps. Today I am going to show you how to use it to make a Twitter list that automatically grows by adding each person to the list that mentions you on Twitter. Then you can add this list as a stream in your Twitter app like HootSuite to track it.

1.Go to your Twitter account and Select your profile view. You will select Lists from the menue in the left.  then you select Create List  from the list column on the right.

2. Make a private list called, Engagers.

3. Go to ifttt, and select Create a Task in the Twitter channel.

4. Select the Trigger, “New mention of you”.

5. Now Select and Action in the Twitter channel, choose “Add user to list” and type the name of the list you created in step 1, Engagers. Don’t worry about the thing that says  # tags or addins. You won’t need those for this.

6. Add a stream column for the Twitter list in HootSuite of your favorite social media dashboard.

Now, each time anyone  RTs you or sends you an @ message, they will be added to this list and all of their tweets will show up in your special Engagers stream. This will let you focus your attention on the people who have been most responsive to you.

The iftt application is very cool and has a lot of other uses. Check out some of the recipes others have used to automate certain tasks. Another one I like a lot is the ability to automatically send all of my Instagram photos to Flickr! I will work on that soon.

Dear NewTricks Team,

I thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not getting enough Social Media and Organic search engine traffic. Your Social profile is not available in top Social Media websites. Your SEO score is 87%. We can bring it to 100% by implementing on and off-page factors which will fetch better results in major search engines. Your site has 1 Google back link, this can be improved further. ( by the way, none of this is true. They go on to say….)

There are many additional improvements that could be made to your website, and if you would like to learn about them, and are curious to know what our working together would involve, then I would be glad to provide you with a detailed analysis in the form of a WEBSITE AUDIT REPORT for FREE.

To brief you about our company, we are one of the fastest-growing Internet Marketing Company of the world. We give money back guarantee.

Our clients consistently tell us that their customers find them because they are at the top of the Google search rankings. Being at the top left of Google (#1- #3 organic positions) is the best thing you can do for your company’s website traffic and online reputation.

Sounds interesting? Feel free to email us or alternatively you can provide me with your phone number and the best time to call you.

Or how about this one:

Hi, I am Miki Katie, I have done a bit of research about your website and found if you can build some links for newtricks.me with wordpress website design as your keyword you can see some ranking improvements quickly.

To prove that, I am interested in giving you 11 high quality and most relevant links that are worth $19 a month aboulutely (their spelling) free and I request you to share any ranking improvements you see during this time.

Here are the links I wish to give for aboulutely (their spelling) free

 

I get five of these things offers a day from various sources. Many of these offers are from individuals living in countries where several 19.00′s per month would be a great income. And there are plenty o’ shysters right here in the USA. One of my clients this year had paid 7,000 for a simple static, boilerplate  website six years ago, and then had been paying 100.00 per month for the company to add keywords and links to her site for all that time. When I checked into it what I saw were twenty links to her site from some of their other  totally no-related sites that were not evident on their published pages,  and they were certainly not doing anything on an on-going basis. On top of all of that, when she told them she was going to need her domains name user name and passwords and going to be building a WordPress site and moving  it to a new hosting account they tried to scare her about how much damage that was going to do to her search ranking and that her new web person ( me) must be very bad to even suggest the change.

These SEO scams are powerful because they prey on your fear and your hope that their really is a passive, easy way to insure that your site shows up in searches for your niche key words and phrases.  The other thing that makes it a beautiful scam is that most people who part from their money in this way are also not savvy enough to even know if it is working or not.  I have had people so excited to see that they were at the top of a Google search for some phrase or another only to be really disappointed to find out that their computer was caching their results and that they were in fact on the fifth page when anyone else in Atlanta Google the term and no where to be seen when the search was not localized.

Yes there are legitimate people and companies that provide SEO services. We were just discussing this issue at tour Atlanta WordPress Meetup Group this week where a couple of our members do work for them. They help companies build SEO by finding the best words and phrases, ones that have the highest potential to be searched for with the least amount of competition. They then examine each and every page on the site and make sure the content is focused on these terms and getting traffic. They get rid of pages that are not performing, they help write optimized, organic content ( usually writing fees start at 100.00 a page), they prepare a link plan to help get links to their site from high page rank sites and some of the efforts comment on other websites and get links from Social Media) and one person was ranting about how many people were being bilked out of their money from these services which are playing to people’s fears and are hard to track whether they were successful or not.

Here is a presentation by Sujan Patel that I thought was one of the best I attended at WordCamp San Francisco. Sujan  is the founder and president of the SEO consulting agency Single Grain. Before starting his own agency, Single Grain, Sujan worked in-house for some high profile companies. He knows the “ins and outs” of Internet marketing including SEO, social media marketing, and link building and works with other companies now to increases their organic rankings, traffic, brand awareness and ROI.

Hopefully you won’t find anything bad when you Google your name or your business name. But the other extreme, not showing up at all, is not good either.

The remedy to both issues is the same. Set up some social media accounts and fill them out completely. If you don’t have a website, set up a one page About.me account. If it is your business that is failing to show up, make sure that you claim your Yelp listing and add it to Google Local Business. Are you a doctor or a lawyer? I really hate to look up a professional and have them hard to find. You know the drill, you get all of those sites that give you their name and maybe a phone number.

It looks really lame not to have any real listings show up in a search. It is 2012, it is time to get over yourself and get this done. As my client, Mel Stowers, a commercial real estate broker, said when he came to me to do his online makeover, “I have to get with it. I am a Leo and we like to look good!”

You don’t have to do it all at once unless you are trying to push down something negative off the front page by adding new search results. Make a list of what you can do and then go about fixing up your search results, as you have time.

But don’t bookmark this and forget to do it

There are others who think they are doing social media and that it isn’t working but what I see is social media done for its own sake, without a plan. We call that random acts of marketing. This shotgun approach results in a lot of time spent on social media without much result. But the first thing to have is a goal. And then to create a plan to reach that goal.  With a goal and a plan you will know what to blog about, what to tweet about, where to spend your social media time, and the strategy behind using your social media network channels effectively.

Your plan does not have to be a lengthy, complicated tome that is full of useless boilerplate and gets put on a shelf and never referred to. Instead make it simple and to the point. It can be one page.

How do you go about making a social media plan for your small business? I thought you’d never ask…

Make a Social Media Plan For Your Small Business

1. What is it that you do and who do you do it for?
2. Why should people choose you?
3. What are your short term and long term goals.
4. What infrastructure do you need to have in place? Computer, Accounting, Website, Storefront, Mobile Phone,  Accounts on the major social media networks… 
5. What are the baseline business activities that you must do on a regular basis to reach your goals? Checking and responding to e-mails, sending out proposals, creating and sending a weekly newsletter, writing # of blog posts on a rotating variety of topic areas . . .
6. What are five top business ideas or activities you have thought of doing to reach your goals. Online and Offline activities.
7. Rate and rank the above activities as to their bang for the buck in reaching your goals.
8. Outline a short plan with action items and dates to accomplish each of the above activities you have selected to complete. Include how you can use free social media networks to help you to reach these goals.
9. Keep doing your baseline activities and then implement your new business ideas, rinse and repeat.

WordPress Website is the Hub of Your Marketing Plan

I believe that before doing any social media you need a WordPress website for your business that you can easily keep updated with current info. It can be very simple but should be designed in a way that tells people what you do and how to do business with you. Only then can you convert visitors, that come to your site because of your compelling social media activities, into clients. Small businesses can’t compete with the larger businesses on a dollars spent basis, but you have the upper hand in the ability to be more personal and to develop a following based on building a business that people want to be a part of. Your website and blog is where that happens. Your social media activities then extend the reach of your message and bring people back to your website where they will be so impressed that they buy something from you or hire you.

Set Up Social Media Accounts

Once you have the website, you will want to set up accounts on all of the major social networks. Don’t worry you will not have to spend time on each of them all of the time. Depending on your goals you may have a focus on one or another in a bigger way. But go ahead and get the accounts,  set them up properly and then work to create some content on them, such as some tweets, a video or two, and a completed profiles with photos. (Oh by the way, get a good profile photo taken and use that on all of your social media accounts. And in most cases use your own self and not pictures of your dog or your logo or horrors, you with your baby or spouse.)

Having these accounts set up helps with your business and personal search results because when people search for you or your  business you will have an online presence that you have created.  Your LinkedIn, YouTube account, or Twitter account will show up and drive other entries off the front page. Second, having these accounts help your website SEO by getting links back to your site from these high ranking sites. And for example when you write a blog post and then create a tweet about it, the search engines are notified and come to index that post right away.

You Must Have a Twitter Account And Learn To Use It

I think most everyone who has a business should have a Twitter account unless something is wrong with you. Was that mean? But really Twitter is like e-mail or texting except you have access to everyone, everywhere.  Go ahead and get an account. People won’t follow people back if your account still has the Twitter egg showing up as your profile pic. Write a good bio and mention your business and link to it in the bio.  Write a good, clever, humorous or otherwise compelling bio as people will read it to determine if they want to follow you.

To get started with Twitter,  go to a app like Tweepi and find people to follow that matter to you. Tweepi shows you lists of the followers or friends of any other person on Twitter. It is really like being able to copy someone’s Rolodex! You can search for people you admire in your industry or neighborhood or market or search for your competitors and find out who they follow and who follows them. Choose people to follow from that list and a good percentage of people you select will follow you back.

You do not have to be on Twitter all day. I check in with it in the morning when drinking my coffee and if I have to wait for anything during the day. You can determine a plan that makes sense for you.

Make Social Media Easier with Apps

There are a lot of apps to make using social media easier. I use HootSuite to view all of my social network accounts and I can send my updates to Twitter or Facebook or Linkedin them that one interface. You can schedule a series of tips to go out on a regular basis with HootSuite or Buffer App. I recommend you spend ten or fifteen minutes a day reading tweets from your stream and interacting with people that you find interesting. Twitter is about creating relationships that can transcend the online world. You will be amazed at what is possible with the connections you make this way.

You don’t need to spend hours a day on these activities. But based upon your goals and the activities you decided to persue above, you will want to create a baseline of basic social media and marketing activities,  that  you commit to do on a regular basis, that are designed to develop Know, Like and Trust relationships your clients, potential clients and referral sources. Most of these activities should be “engaging”  activities that are not all about you. Examples of engaging activities are commenting on other people’s blog posts, responding to or retweeting their tweets or liking their shares on Facebook.

Decide on who you would like to develop relationships with and make sure to focus on them, but don’t just ignore everyone. You never know when those special magical connections may occur. If you are authentic and helpful across the board, people will notice and remember and tell other people about you.

Commit to Your Baseline Social Media Activities

You will need to be committed to keep your website content current by such activities as writing blog posts each week, (the magic number depends on your specific business and goals). Nothing says dead business than a site that is not currently posting.  I believe getting people to sign up for your e-mail list is essential and then it is essential to actually send out a weekly newsletter. The frequency, type and content depends on your market and goals but without this your people will forget about you and your website. Really.  You may want to create and pre-schedule a series of tips that go out several times a day on Twitter or your Facebook Page. You can link your blog posts to automatically show up on LinkedIn and or your Facebook Page.  So there are some activities that you do as a baseline for your business and then your other social media activities should be more targeted and directed towards your specific business goals.

For these more targeted goal related activities you will need to choose the best social media platform and activities for your type of business and your goals. As a small business owner you have to be strategic about deciding where to spend your social media time.

Be Strategic Planning Social Media Efforts

If you have a Bricks and Morter location, restaurant or an online store your Facebook Page is a great place to plan a campaign. Create and use a Facebook Page rather than using your personal account since frequent business updates may cause your friends to get irritated and even hide you. Make sure your page is set up thoroughly with the new Cover Image and a 180 x 180 pixel business profile image.  On the Facebook Page, you can create deals of the week or special days with different emphasis, Oyster Wednesdays for example or a martini contest. Be inventive and creative and connect with people. It is like you are having a party so you need to be fun and inviting.  We all want to belong to something bigger than ourselves. Use Facebook to give people a way to feel like they belong. We love to feel like we are in the know, have the latest scoop. You can create that on Facebook and reinforce it with your newsletter and blog posts.

If you are a professional and your clients are in Corporate America then LinkedIn is essential to your business. I believe everyone should have a completed, updated LinkedIn Profile with your blog linked to it so that your blog post excerpts, show up on your LinkedIn page with links back to your website. For certain types of businesses, actively participating in Linked by joining and taking part in relevant groups can be a great source of networking which will build up or remind people of your professional reputation. It is a great forum to establish yourself as a thought leader in your industry.

LinkedIn is a great place for people to post recommendations of you for you. These days, we place more trust in testimonials and recommendations posted on third party sites than the those posted by an individual on their own website. While we are discussing recommendations, don’t forget to ask their happy clients to write a recommendation or review. In addition to LinkedIn they can post them on  Yelp, Trip Advisor, Bed and Breakfast.com or other sites relevant to your business. Make sure your business has a completed and “claimed by you ” profile on each of these relevant sites and be sure to claim your business on the free Google Local business. These sites are great for search results and you don’t have to do anything on them once you set them up, except remember to go update them with any changes such as your hours or your phone number.  Set up Google Alerts with a search query for your business name and you will be notified by e-mail, when anyone writes anything about your business online.

Is your business visual? Or could it be? Upload your extra photos to Flickr and organize them into sets. Link to a certain set from Twitter, LinkedIn or your blog posts. Make sure there is a link back to your website on your Flickr account profile.

Create some videos and post them on YouTube. Even if you think your business isn’t creative, think again. Check out  how these young guys with a junk removal service have used You Tube videos to build their brand and a following.

If you have a design firm, or a visual business, if you create art or food, Pinterest is a great way to showcase your brand and to let other people showcase your work. But even if your business isn’t creative in and of itself, use Pinterest to show who you are and what you like and whats important to you or your brand. It is a great source of links back to your site.  I recently created a Pinterest Bio Board and uploaded pins that represent who I am, where I have been and what I have been up to.

Make It Easy On Others to Share Your Content

I know you know that you should have Twitter, Facebook and Google Plus share buttons under your blog posts so people can share them on their social media sites, but be sure to add a Pin It icon under your blog posts or product web pages so that your visitors can easily share your images on Pinterest themselves. When they do so they often then automatically share them on Facebook or Twitter.  You get some great exposure just for including a button on your website. One rather new food blogger I know got 6,000 hits to her website by pinning a photo of her Peanut butter and Jelly French Toast to a Pinterest board.

For Success – Plan and Work Your Plan

There is so much free exposure out there. But once you have a WordPress website and all of your accounts set up then learn how to use them. And make a plan as to how you want to use these resources to  best accomplish your goals remembering to be strategic rather than shotgun since your time is not free. If you have a business to run, you can’t allow yourself to fall into the trap of spending hours on non-goal related social media or live networking events that are not directly pertinent to your goals. If you do waste your time on random acts of marketing,  please do not complain to me that social media is not working for your business. In this day, if you are doing what I have outlined above and you are not rolling in business, then you need some consulting that you are doing it right or you need to face the fact that you do not have a good business model. Otherwise, if you have a plan and work it,  these activities will work to get you business, and the type of  business that you want.

Using Backup Buddy for WordPress Backups and Migrations

I never do extensive repairs or customizations to a live site.  Instead, I make a mirror site on a sub-directory of one of my hosting accounts, using it as a test site. This way, I can make the changes, see that they work and get approval from the client before moving the mirror site back to overwrite the original.

In some cases, creating the mirror site could take longer than actually doing the work on the site. It was a big pain in the …neck. Then,  I started using Backup Buddy,  a premium plugin that does full site back-ups and sends them off  to the cloud or to your hosting account. I use Amazon S3 to store the backups. You can get a Backup Buddy account for a single site rate for about 59.00 per year and the developers’ license is a great deal at $150.00 per year for unlimited use on unlimited sites.

When I get a new client, I install Backup Buddy on their site so I can do backups while I am working on the site.  Depending on the amount of new content that goes on a site,  you can choose to do daily weekly or monthly scheduled backups or you can do one whenever the urge strikes you .  Once the site goes live, I will keep them on Backup Buddy if they want me to maintain their site. Otherwise I keep the final backup and deactivate  the plugin key.

Amazon S3 Cloud Storage for Backups

The Amazon S3 cloud storage account was easy to set up. And get this, for the first year they don’t charge you a dime. Since I have all my client backups going there, I was a bit worried about what the charges would be when my year was up. But, it was so insignificant,   a whopping 4.00 or so each month.  And it would probably be less if I went in and cleared the old backups out more often.

Using BackUp Buddy For Site Migration

In addition to site Back-ups, Backup Buddy is great for migrating sites to another server. To migrate a site, you must set up a new database on a hosting account either the root directory, if it is empty,  or if you already have a site in the root, then you add it as a sub-directory.

Setting up a new database is not as hard as it may sound. I use Bluehost which has a C-panel. You log in and go to C-Panel and find the My SQL Database Admin tab. That brings up a fool proof set of steps to walk you through adding a new database and setting it up.

This process will walk you through the following steps:

1. You will need to name your new database, and give it a password.
2. You then create a user name. After that the  user name needs to be assigned to that database you just created.
3. Then you set the permissions for “All”.
4. Be sure to write down the database and user names as well as the password!

You then go to Backup Buddy and get your fresh complete backup and download it somewhere you can get to it.  Hit the Big Button that says, Migrate or Restore and it will download a importbuddy.php file. With FTP, drag both your backup and this import buddy files from your desktop into the directory on your server that you want the new site to appear in.If you are not wanting it in the root, make a new directory and drag the zipped backup and the importbuddy.php files into that directory. (Once, I forgot this step and did not make a new directory  making a new directory and I overwrote the site that was in the root directory! Whoopsie!) Don’t make my mistake. Be careful and think it through.

Once you have the database set up, the directory made and the two files in it, you are ready to run the importbuddy script. Type your site url into the address bar and /importbuddy.php at the end. Like this: http://your site url.com/importbuddy.php. This will start running the script which will bring up a series of seven windows asking you for some info. Just fill it the required fields with your handy names and passwords that you jotted down before.  Et Voila. You should have a complete copy of the original site. Yes that would include all of your user names and passwords and your configured plugins, and your images and your forms and Everything!!!

The Frightening Part

What I Hate, Hate, Hate, is the part after I have made changes to a client’s mirror site and have to replace the currently live and fully functional  site with the new version I have just created. That means I have to blow away the original site files so I have a clean directory and make the new database, and follow all of the steps from above.

Yikes. There is something so wrong about the step where you erase the original site files. I mean it is the right thing to do but it kind of makes me sick to my stomach. It is silly that I feel that way since I have a fully working backup site. But,  I don’t care, I still hate to wipe out an existing site. There is something so permanent about it and for control freaks there is still the chance that the new site won’t load or some other horrible fantasy and then what will I do?

But let me tell you, doing this without Backup Buddy is so much worse. Trust me. A few moments of terror, versus hours of tedium.  Now, my friends who are database geeks may scoff at using Backup Buddy,  but I am not fooling, it is plain old scary to nuke an existing live site and then do the migration. So if I have to do it I want it to come out completely set up. Doing it the old fashioned way does not bring over all of the configured  plugins  and certain images and there is a lot of cleaning up to do. With Backup Buddy everything is complete.

Do you have any horror stories of a time you erased a site? How about if you couldn’t get it back. Ugh. Let’s hear about it!

You can see how I included a link to sign up for my newsletter. You might want to promote an upcoming event or have a special quote. I would suggest not going overboard with the information in your signature. We’ve all seen people who cannot leave anything off of their business card or their e-mail signature and it is information overload. If there is too much, people will ignore it all.

I am going to tell you how to do this in Gmail but the system is pretty much the same in any e-mail program. To create your signature in Gmail click the gear icon in the upper right corner of your Gmail page and select “Settings.” Halfway down the settings page, you will see the box to add your new signature.

If you would like to add an image to your signature like I did, you can read one of my earlier and more popular posts.

You can set up to receive and send mail “from” multiple addresses in Gmail, and you can set a different signature for each e-mail address in the General tab of your settings. Choose the second radio button in the “Signature:” section, use the drop-down menu to choose the appropriate address and set the signature you want.

How to Make My Existing Websites Mobile Friendly?  If the site is not built with WordPress and doesn’t look good on a mobile device, now may be the time to port it over to a Responsive WordPress Theme that automatically adapts the site presentation for each display size. StudioPress and Woo Themes have a growing number of responsive themes to choose from. For an existing WordPress site not built using a responsive theme, there are some plugins such as WP Touch, that will present your site content into format that shows the posts. I prefer seeing the whole site rather than just the posts, and many of the existing themes look and work fine on iPhones and iPads.

I got laid off last year so I am working in someone else’s production company and helping them grow their business rather than grow my own. I want to start my own business but I don’t have start-up money since the Mac I want is $4,000.  Sorry you were laid off and I am glad you found employment in your field. However, I encourage you to go ahead and start working on your own business in your free time. Get everything prepared: your branding, your website, your social media accounts and then get any computer that can do the job. Put on your powers of positive thinking and attraction. You will be able to find a computer that you can use for less than $4,000. You have to start with gratitude for where you are and start the ball rolling by doing the things I suggested. Put your desires out there and get a piece of paid business and then keep it rolling. The small things will cheer you up and motivate you until you feel you can make it on your own. You will be amazed!

Thanks for the post on Head shots. I have a friend whose 12 year old daughter recently appeared on The Rachel Ray Show for a cooking demo. I thought the article on head shots might be useful for her mom, since this *kid* is clearly going places! This would be a great time for your friend to help her daughter put up a website to post her own episodes of her cooking classes. What an opportunity. I can imagine this would be a big hit.

I have been using the WordPress Database Backup plugin but recently it just stopped working. I do manually backup the entire site with my cPanel every few days and ftp it to my local drive but that is a hassle. I would rather have an automated process. I was thinking about purchasing BackupBuddy and the question I have is where to send and keep the backups? As you know the WP database backup only backs up your content not your WordPress Theme files. So that is why you are backing those up by hand. But that is cumbersome and, thankfully, unnecessary. I use Backup Buddy to back up the sites, and I have it set to send the backups to my Amazon S3 account. An Amazon S3 account is free for the first year! And after that it is still very inexpensive. Backup Buddy also makes it really easy to move to another web host. Many times I build a site on my test server and then use Backup Buddy to move it to the client’s server.  I also recommend in addition to use the backup services your hosting company provides. I use the Bluehost Pro Backup service which keeps backups of the individual files. That way if something screws up, and I know where it is, I can simply overwrite that one file and Voila, back in business.

My clients are picking me to death wanting me to add and change things after they have already chosen the design they wanted from the three comps I gave them. I try to go by the contract, but some clients just don’t understand boundaries! I like to compare this process of setting boundaries with web design to that of the renovation of a house. If someone came to me with a limited budget for a kitchen renovation, I would say, “well lets put together a proposal that fits your budget, and it will have certain moderate finishes, not granite and not finely jointed custom cabinetry.” Then, when into the job, they say, “Wouldn’t a Viking Stove look great in here?” I would readily agree but would also remind them that unfortunately they did not buy the kitchen remodeling package with a Viking Stove. And then that would be the end of it, unless they could come up with some extra money for a change order for the higher priced appliance package.

When we are doing web design because we can create a “Viking Stove” we forget to tell the client that they didn’t buy it. We want them to be happy, but it ends up being at our expense and then we are not happy and they are on a path to ask for more and more. Having my three packages helps me and the client to remember that they bought the Working Dog rather than the Best in Breed.

You all asked a lot more great questions, so stay tuned, and I promise to write more on the topics you brought up!